LOGSDEN – The goats on this rural 12-acre farm are a cheeky bunch all right. They'll nibble at your pockets, poke around your purse and even unzip your jacket.

But when you're the secret ingredient behind world-acclaimed cheese, perhaps you're entitled to a bit of sass.

These are the goats of Three Ring Farm, where for years the awards for their Rivers Edge Chevre have been pouring in like so much fine cream.

But as winning as mom and daughter cheesemakers Pat and Astraea Morford may be, even they were shocked when their chevre recently took top honors for the best American cheese in the world in a British contest.

"Pretty much every competition we've competed in, we've come away with awards," said Pat Morford. "So we were just doodling along like we do, competing in the ones we knew about and coming away with awards. It was good."

Cheese festival

The Oregon Cheese Guild will hold the 10th anniversary of its annual cheese festival next month. Visitors will have the opportunity to sample cow, goat and sheep cheese from all over the Pacific Northwest – and beyond – as well as wines, beer and smoked meat.

If you go:

What: 10th Anniversary of the Oregon Cheese Guild Annual Festival

Where: Rogue Creamery, Central Point

When: March 14-16

For the full schedule (including the limited admission beer and cheese pairing contest) and ticket prices, go to www.oregoncheeseguild.org

Then they honed in on the international arena of fine cheese championships, where competitors from all over the globe have been making fine cheese forever.

"These were huge world cheese competitions," said Pat Morford. "Winning is something that happens once in a lifetime."

Except in this case, where it happened twice. In one year.

If you never heard of Rivers Edge Chevre, don't feel bad. Most – even in this coastal range community – have not. And chances of stumbling upon it, set seven miles out one country road and then six miles down another, are not so hot, either. That is, unless you're lucky enough to spot the blue on yellow sign with the stick figure dancing goats and notice of Goat Cheese For Sale.

And yet people all over the country – and beyond – have tasted these cheeses.

Last July, their Humbug Mountain won "Best USA Cheese," at the International Cheese Awards in Nantwich, England – the world's largest cheese competition. Competing at the annual festival – established in 1897 – were 4,286 competitors from 27 countries.

Then in November, as the pair cleaned house in preparation for Thanksgiving, checking on e-mails from family to see who was coming and who was not, it was Pat Morford who opened the note from Guild of Fine Food World Cheese Awards Judge David Gremmels (also co-owner of Rogue Creamery) to read:

"Congratulations Pat on winning a Supreme Super Gold tonight at the World Cheese Awards and being crowned Best American Cheese... I chose, presented and championed your cheese tonight on the supreme judges panels. It showed and tasted brilliantly ..."

The award from the BBC Good Food Show in Birmingham, England, was for the Morford's "Up In Smoke," entry, a hand-formed round of fresh chevre smoked over maple and alder, then wrapped in Big Leaf Maple leaves misted with bourbon. It was judged against 60 competing cheeses by a panel of 15 judges from 13 countries.

You'd think a celebration would be in order. And it was, more or less – sooner or later. But there was work to be done first.

"We just kept going," said Astraea (named for the Greek Muse of Justice). "You have to keep marching along. You have to keep doing cheese room work, keep cleaning ..."

Sundays are for pasteurizing milk from the goats, which are milked morning and evening. Monday is for dipping cheese – shorthand for putting the cheese in forms or bags; Tuesday, they salt and pack curd – depending on the kind of cheese they're making; Wednesday, they take the cheese out of the forms and pasteurize (again).

And Thursday, it starts all over again. Throughout the week, they package, they clean, they turn the cheese (affinage). And in between it all, there are the animals to tend to.

Goats and sheep and chickens, all needing to be fed and cleaned and vaccinated and generally cared for. The goats are bottle fed as babies – making them much more personable (and apt to pick pockets) and easy to care for. And recently, the pair took on the feeding of some new lambs.

"The animals are No. 1 for us," said Pat Morford. "We try to do everything we can to make their lives good. We give them every opportunity to thrive.

It was the goats that inspired Pat Morford to make cheese. She's raised the animals since she was a child. She had the milk. Why not cheese?

"I made my first cheese in about 1972," she recalled. "That was for home use. If you have milk you're going to do something with it. I had a lot of milk. It was edible. It was rubbery, but it tasted good. We ate it."

Back then, there wasn't a whole lot of information out there for home cheese makers. "In fact, there was none," Morford said. "I was experimenting on my own. For years it was just ricotta and then just simple chevre. We'd make it with yogurt or buttermilk and drain it through cheese cloth.

"In the 1990s, I decided I would make cheese professionally. If it wasn't good, I fed it to the chickens. There is a huge learning curve to making good cheese. It's basically science, chemistry, magic, it's all of those ..."

Rivers Edge Chevre can be found in specialty shops around Oregon, in California and back east, but recently the Morfords made it even simpler for local cheese fans to get theirs fresh from the farm.

It works on the honor system. Visitors pick their cheese from an old mini fridge – formerly gracing Astraea's college dorm room – add up the cost and drop the cash in the little Paprika box on the table next to it.

Astraea, who has a degree in horticulture from Oregon State University, is hoping to use the cash to build a greenhouse so the pair can grow their own herbs for their cheeses year round.

So far, the fridge and paprika box have been a success.

"It makes it so people can just come over and pick it up," Astraea said. "It's a pretty wide variety of people, really ... from those we know to people who heard about us, who are just traveling through and are interested in cheese. They've heard about us or read about us ... and so they come find us."

Simple enough. And those who do have questions are encouraged to knock on the red front door. Barring that, you might just give a shout in the direction of the goats.